To get young people to vote, students ramp up the peer...

1of4Max Lubin, founder of Rise California, speaks with students during a VoteCrew event on the UC Berkeley campus Sept. 25.Photo: Photos by Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle

2of4Voting material fills a VoteCrew table at UC Berkeley on National Voter Registration Day last last month.Photo: Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle

3of4Cal student Harry Lee, left, registers to vote at the VoteCrew table during National Voter Registration Day on the UC Berkeley campus in Berkeley, Calif., on Tuesday September 25, 2018Photo: Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle

4of4Lubin shows the VoteCrew website, which encourages young people to vote in the midterms.Photo: Michael Short / Special to The Chronicle

A group of California students is using the power of peer pressure to bring young people to the polls.

In anticipation of November’s midterms, the students behind Rise California — a nonprofit advocating for free tuition at the state’s public universities — created a digital platform to get out the vote. The site, called VoteCrew, relies on the ability of social pressure to influence behavior. In this case, that behavior is voting.

“There’s something about building community and doing something with your friends that’s really, really powerful,” said Max Lubin, who is working toward a master’s degree in public policy at UC Berkeley and founded Rise California.

“It’s about taking this thing that we’ve sort of historically thought of being a solemn and solitary endeavor,” and making it social, Lubin said.

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With VoteCrew, the notion of a more social voting experience takes the form of a peer-to-peer messaging platform. By texting an activation code or signing up online, eligible voters join individual “crews” and receive text message reminders to register to vote and to cast a ballot on or before election day.

Within the online site, participants can post messages, pledge their intention to vote and report to teammates when they cast their ballots. While targeted at young people and students, VoteCrew is open to all those eligible to vote in the U.S.

“The frame from a technology perspective was to make it as lightweight as possible, to meet young people where they are,” Lubin said.

It is a modern response to a familiar problem. Only 8 percent of eligible Californians ages 18 to 24 voted in the 2014 general election, a record low, according to the secretary of state.

“VoteCrew is about recognizing that the current approach to getting our friends to vote hasn’t been working,” Lubin said.

The digital approach to get out the vote emerged from Lubin’s experiences organizing local, state and national campaigns. Lubin, 28, got his start in politics in high school during Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential run. He canvassed, worked on phone banks and did voter registration in Southern California, then cast his first ballot in the general election shortly after turning 18.

“Pretty much every day after school I would drive down to a little field office near Venice Beach and sort of learn how to organize,” Lubin said.

By 2012, Lubin was a paid employee of the Obama campaign, working as a field organizer in Palm Beach County, Fla.

“I’ve probably knocked on 10,000 doors, and that’s with a pencil and paper,” Lubin said. “If you’re working as an organizer, you work 80 to 100 hours a week.”

The experience informed Lubin’s sense of what’s lacking in get-out-the-vote efforts. Between work, school and extracurricular activities, college students don’t have the bandwidth for time-intensive, “old-fashioned” organizing, he said. “VoteCrew is about building how to do this better.”

VoteCrew started its pilot program for the June primary election. Of more than 1,000 participants, just over 24 percent reported that they had voted — three times the rate for young people in California in November 2014.

The results attracted the attention of the Voter Participation Center, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C., that focuses on increasing voting among Millennials, unmarried women and people of color.

“We’re thrilled to be working with them,” said Page Gardner, president of the Voter Participation Center, which now accounts for a major share of VoteCrew’s $100,000 endowment.

The concept is drawn from intensive research, she added.

“They were pretty rigorous in looking at their effect” on voter participation.

Lubin’s instincts regarding how peer pressure and social accountability influence voting reflect expert opinion on the best ways to get voters to the polls.

“The things that we know work for mobilizing people are very personal contact” and “the pressure from the people you know,” said Eric McGhee, research fellow at the nonprofit Public Policy Institute of California.

“It sounds like they’ve been reading some of this research,” McGhee said of VoteCrew.

VoteCrew has more than 2,000 members in 227 crews across college campuses in California, Florida, Ohio and New York. The digital platform is linked to on-the-ground efforts. For National Voter Registration Day last week, students with UC Berkeley’s student government paired with VoteCrew to launch “Bears to the Ballot,” a program that will award up to $1,000 to the campus crews that bring the most people to the polls.

“There really is no better way for people like me to get engaged,” said Dana Alpert, 20, a senior at UC Berkeley who is directing the initiative. “It’s super-accessible — it’s really easy to do.”

If mobilized, Millennials are in position to make an impact in November. Millennials, defined by the Pew Research Center as those born between 1981 and 1996, and their younger siblings in Generation Z are now the largest generation in the U.S.

“In California’s most competitive districts, there are more students than the vote margin in 2016,” Lubin said. “It’s about showing students that when we speak up, when we make ourselves heard ... we can really change policy and change our own lives.”

Holly Honderich is a reporting fellow with The Chronicle’s politics team. Originally from Toronto, Canada, Holly graduated from Queen’s University in political science and is completing her master’s in journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School. Before joining The Chronicle, Holly wrote for the Toronto Star and, most recently, the BBC’s DC bureau, where she completed a reporting trip to the Mexico-US border to cover protests to US immigration policy. Her work has been featured in USA Today, Illinois Channel and UPI.